5 Core Content Types Every Marketer Needs To Succeed

Fill Your Editorial Calendar Without Hurting Your Budget

No [piece of content] is an island complete in itself.

Long before content marketing ever existed John Donne understood its interconnected nature.

Content is part of your organization’s total offering. It makes what Harvard Business Professor Theodore Levitt dubbed “intangibles.” These attributes of your products and services aren’t concrete. They can’t be tested in advance.

To yield measurable results, often known as content ROI, your content must be integrated as building blocks of a larger whole. They must be aligned with your organization’s key goals.

To this end, you need a mix of the 5 core content types. Together they meet your target audiences’ information needs. Additionally, they generate awareness and engagement that produce quality leads and sales.

5 Core content types

1. Foundational content

Often referred to as pillar content, this content type forms the core of your content offering. It’s the content to which you’ll link back to in you’re future content. It should generate the lion’s share of your traffic and leads. As your content evolves, it’ll need updating to stay relevant.

It answers the question associated with your business goals:

What do you want to be known for?

Keep your response simple. It’s much easier to convey to your audiences, including your employees and stakeholders. To stand out, use original research content to verify the one data point that’s often asserted but rarely supported.

Select 3 words to represent your content focus. (This is a variation on Chris Brogan’s annual 3 word tagline.) It’s key to ensuring you can own these terms in your niche and search. If they’re too close to a competitor or close substitute, consider changing them via what Joe Pulizzi calls a content tilt or pivot.

At a minimum, start your content marketing with 3 to 5 pieces of foundational content.

Collectively, your foundational content should:

Answer the question: “How can we help our readers and the broader community?”

The key to customer-focused content is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes. To this end, create a marketing persona.

Don’t guess what your customers want.

Ask them.

Really it’s that simple!

Take a page from Social Triggers’ Derek Halpern. Ask what keeps your prospects up at night in your email confirmation.

Ask your readers to tell you what is on their minds

You can create customer-focused content on a regular basis. Translation: Every day or every week.

Even better, get your fellow employees to help you create this core content type! This includes customer-facing personnel such as customer service and sales.

Don’t ask them to write articles or blog for you. Instead create a special customer content email address and ask them to blind copy it for every customer question they answer. This provides a first draft for your blog post. The catch: You must monitor this email box on a regular basis!

BTW, another Sheridan tip (I’m sorry but the guy’s a sales genius!):

Create a “Who You DON’T Want As A Customer?” post. The key is to explain why. Since everyone wants to belong, it converts like a charm! That’s what Sheridan told me!

3. Cyclical Content

Think like a traditional media company to develop this core content type.

David Meerman Scott who created the term newsjacking cleverly tapped into the media frenzy over Donald Trump. (Note: Scott was careful to state that he was NOT writing a political piece. Be careful of topics that attract readers who just want to flame a high visibility topic.)

Don’t limit yourself to print publications like newspapers and magazines for your inspiration. Use television, radio and events as well.

The fake news like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight also provides useful inspiration. These half hour comedy shows are broken into segments like a 3 act show.

First segment. Curates the real news to present commentary on what’s happening. The host rifts on a hot news topic adding a satirical spin.

Second segment. Is a feature story. Think magazine cover story mixed with investigative reporting. Often it’s an on-going series. Stephen Colbert was brilliant at this. His “Better Know A District” was a series of conversations with sitting Representatives.

Third segment. Is an interview with someone interesting. Jon Stewart established his political chops giving him access to a wide range of politicians who wanted access to his hard-to-reach 18-30 year old male demographic.

Like a traditional media entity, you can create cyclical content on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

4. Crowd Pleaser Content

This core content type is blue ribbon content. By its nature, it attracts readers and shares.

Publish this long, useful content monthly to support your traffic and visibility. But understand that you get what you pay for. Crowd Pleaser content takes resources and time to gather, organize and optimize the information.

Syed Balkhi tapped into the power of this content with his List25 blog. It’s a smart move. It has an easy-to-follow format for both readers and content curators. Every post consists of (you guessed it!) 25 points. It’s a no brainer.

Here’s an example of one of List25’s top posts, 25 Things Women Say That Men Misunderstand. You know from the title that every visitor will read it and shake their head in agreement. Check the opening and a select point.

Beyond creating quality content, you need to balance your resources and budget. While content marketing budgets have remained constant or increased, they’re still finite. Therefore you need a content mix of resource-intense content and limited resource content.

Further, a mix of these 5 core content types enables you to reach different segments of your audience. It supports different points during their purchase process and fulfills your readers’ content needs.

Use a mix of core content types provides the added benefit of improving your content ROI. Long playing content keeps older high value content stays top of mind and weak content can be improved. Either way it’s a win your finance team will love.

Actionable Marketing Guide publishes new posts from 2 to 5 times each week. You will receive a summary of each new post from “Heidi Cohen”. The email’s subject line will begin “Actionable Marketing Guide” followed by the title of the new post.

4 Responses to 5 Core Content Types Every Marketer Needs To Succeed

Quite an informative blog! I really like the second point which emphasizes on the need of creating customer-focused content. Any piece of content, whether a web page, article, blog, infographic or even a podcast that serves all relevant and important information is surely going to support your marketing strategy. Plus, reaching the influencers is again a powerful tool for the outreach activities.